billmarsano Review of Sunset Song

Sunset Song (2015)

Pretentious Claptrap, Occasionally Pretty to Look At

[3/10 · 8 June 2016]

Seeking irredeemable Presbyterian gloom? Then Sunset Song is the haggis you crave. Critically if unconvincingly acclaimed, it's set in rural 1900-ish Scotland, the part where the scenery is well, OK, but hardly of malt-whiskey-ad beauty. Our heroine is Chris, a lovely and intelligent girl now going on to 'college'--meaning secretarial school as understood at the time. That doesn't happen but never mind —as we're told by the incessant bloody narration, Chris is in love with THE LAND! She identifies with it! Spiritually! Hard to believe, but the narration absolutely insists. Home life is hell or a little worse but Chris survives to make a wonderful marriage. Then that goes bad, and she is sort of inconsolable. Fade out. You can stop reading here unless interested in all the loose parts that drag the thing down. We open with a scene of closeness between Chris and her best gal pal--who then simply disappears. Chris says her Pa is a wool-dyed socialist, committed to universal justice, but that disappears too, and instead we get a religious tyrant who beats his grown son bloody, drives his wife to infanticide and suicide and tries to rape Chris but dies in the attempt. There's another unsuccessful rape attempt, this by the hired man, but it means nothing to the story. The Son should have murder on his mind, but he simply leaves; end of HIS story. After Ma's suicide, two surviving younger siblings are brusquely shipped out: end of THEIR story. Chris runs the farm almost alone yet is somehow an extremely good farmer, at least in the romanticized kind of agriculture retailed here: much moony contemplation/joyous reveling re the (semi-lovely) land, little reference to the back-breaking slavery that rural farming actually was. Enter farmhand Ewan, a gentle, loving, considerate, good- natured paragon of Mr. Right. Theirs is a marriage of the made-in- heaven variety, so catastrophe is guaranteed. Ah yes--World War I. Ewan goes off to the army and returns a brute, a savage, a monster. He's barely through the door when he rapes Chris, which he does nightly. Oh!--the horrors of PTSD, right? Well no. Ewan has been totally dehumanized by a mere few weeks of basic training! When he does go to the front, he immediately deserts, is immediately caught and immediately shot for a coward. We close with Chris sobbing into one of Ewan's shirts, crying piteously "I understood." What? Doesn't she identify with THE LAND anymore? Those who consider narration death to movies, and pointless details likewise, will call this a multiple homicide. The filmmakers' failure here is due to inability to manage the novel that is their source. Turning a novel into a movie almost invariably means leaving LOTS of stuff out so as to focus on the essentials. That didn't happen here, and the result is a barely coherent mess, heavily larded with tedium.